Illuminating Masterpieces at The Munch Museum

BY STAFF REPORTS

Photography by Tomasz Majewski © ERCO GmbH, www.erco.com

Oslo, Norway, the birthplace of the renowned Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, is now home to a stunning new waterfront museum that houses the world’s largest collection of Munch’s works.

The 60m-high tower, designed by Spanish architect Juan Herreros of estudio Herreros, features 13 floors and 11 gallery spaces. This flexibility allows for a versatile lighting system that caters to the diverse needs of individual exhibits and spaces.

The museum's design team, spearheaded by Oslo-based Zenisk, faced the task of ensuring visitors didn't feel a stark difference between natural and artificial lighting. They aimed for an environment where the artificial lighting remained unnoticeable, creating a space that felt natural and intuitive to navigate.

Kristin Bredal, CEO and creative director of Zenisk, a pivotal figure in the lighting design, emphasized, "The objective was to have the artwork seem naturally illuminated. The museum's guiding principle was to prevent the exhibition halls from appearing shadowy, where artworks stood out like isolated icons." Instead, the museum desired its halls to exude a sense of brightness and comfort.

A significant concern was to retain the authenticity of the colors in Munch's masterpieces. Bredal added, "The essence was to accentuate the purity of colors in Munch's artworks." This necessitated an emphasis on superior light quality, accurate color rendering, and precise distribution and angle of lighting.

Recognizing the importance of color rendition, Bredal remarked on the exceptional quality provided by ERCO, alongside other features like seamless light distribution and the ease of optics replacement.

The Innovative Lighting Approach at the Munch Museum

Divided into two zones, static and dynamic, the static zone is devoid of daylight to protect the art. The dynamic zone is more open, with ample glazing to showcase views of Oslo. Visitors transition from areas of daylight into closed, artificially lit spaces, a design choice that required careful consideration to allow for daylight to low light transition necessary for the art.

The lighting creates an illusion of natural illumination without visible focus, reflections or glare. The exhibition halls feel bright and comfortable, not dark with artworks appearing as icons.

Warm white 3000K, utilizing 2,500 DALI-controlled Parscan fittings from ERCO, was installed throughout the museum. The centerpiece of the exhibition is The Scream, one of Munch’s and the world’s most iconic works, described by American journalist/art critic Arthur Lubow as “the Mona Lisa for our times.”

More accurately, three versions of the artwork that Munch created are featured, mounted in cabinets that are alternately open during the day due to their fragility and sensitivity to light exposure. The gallery housing these works is completely dark with black-painted cabinets.

The collection is illuminated to just 2.32fc with precisely adapted framing using ERCO’s Eclipse spotlights. The effect is that the art seems to “emerge from the darkness.” The remainder of the exhibition is lighted so that this main work does not appear dim in comparison.

Bequeathed to the Norwegian government by Munch upon his death in 1944, the collection includes more than 26,700 works, around 1,200 paintings and over 42,000 museum objects. The individuality of the collection, their visibility, the narratives in their curation, and how the room and organization of exhibits are perceived were all factors in the lighting design.